Entegral Blog

By offering competitive industry tools, supporting an agent's personal brand, and investing in a collaborative workplace culture, agencies can make themselves indispensable to their agents and future talent as well. Invest in technology that makes agents better According to an Inman report, real estate agents overwhelmingly support tech tools provided by their agencies. The vast majority of agents at franchised agencies and independent agencies use tech products either on a daily basis or at the very least, a few times a week. Additionally, they have come to rely on their agencies sharing the costs of these technologies. Investing in technology that aids in their productivity will help you retain your current agents and will also become a great selling point for agents considering joining your agency. Here are a few examples of technology that will aid in productivity in your real estate agency: Document Management Contracts, inspection checklists and other real estat...

The little details are what makes the biggest impact  - even more so when you have a service driven business like a real estate agency. Real estate is much more than just brick and mortar - it is about selling the neighbourhood, the lifestyle they will have in their new property, the dreams the investment will fulfil. And you, as real estate agent play a vital role in all of this - and whether it is a positive or negative role depends on the level of service they receive. You can spend thousands of rands on marketing, but if there is no service, the client won’t use you or recommend you. Remember how we spoke about word-of-mouth marketing and social proof? Those are vital to your business. So how can you improve your client-experience without spending even more money? Communication We get it - days are busy, filled with new listings, paperwork and everything else that needs to be done. However, communication is one of the most important factors that influence how a cl...

Your business accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all branded according to your real estate agency but should your agents be using a set branding guidelines when posting on their business profiles? We have already discussed how important branding is for your agency accounts on social media platforms - and if you want to maximise your branding impact, your agents - whether you are part of a large franchise or independent agency - should be using the same set of guidelines you use on your agency profiles. What is a brand guideline? Developing a consistent brand starts with creating a brand style guide. These branding rule books help graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and even product packaging departments all stay on the same page, and present a unified vision of the brand to the public. Why a guideline? The best brands stick in our minds because their presence is defined by the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and imag...

No strangers to the real estate industry and one of Entegral's first clients, RE/MAX 2000 recently launched a new Flex responsive website that not only proudly showcases the well-known brand identity but also allows users to experience cutting-edge real estate technology first hand. Visit the RE/MAX 2000 Flex website The new website features Entegral’s unique Flex responsive website technology which enables the site to be viewed on any device screen size, eliminating the need for an additional mobile website. With integrated features such as a map search, property alerts, and a news section to just name a few, the team which operates in West and Northwest Rand areas, can share their vast property knowledge as well as their property stock on a website that is reliable and efficient. The website is further backed by the Office Management System (OMS) that allows them to manage all their stock, documents and contacts in one easy place, whilst updating their stock to leadi...

They consistently rank as one of the top RE/MAX franchise offices in South Africa. In 2012 they recorded the highest number of property sales transactions for an International brokerage in the entire RE/MAX network and is also one of the founding members of RE/MAX in Southern Africa.  RE/MAX Masters is flying the RE/MAX balloon ‘above the crowd’ with an incredible sales records in their operational areas in Gauteng that include Sandton , Randburg , Roodepoort and Krugersdorp .   A long term Entegral client, we upgraded the RE/MAX Masters website to the very latest Flex responsive real estate website framework .  A clean design that focuses on quick property searches and maximizing their incredible property portfolio. The website automatically adapts to any screen size device, provides better SEO and with a more user friendly and faster interface, aims to attract even more leads for the RE/MAX Masters sales associates. Integrated property alerts emails potential buye...

Century21 Wildlife, a real estate agency situated in Hoedspruit , is certainly one of the estate agencies out there doing the most research and investing so much time in the development and growth of their own company website. Aside from the enormous passion that they have for wildlife and the conservation thereof, they share large amounts of information with regards to the Hoedspruit area, the wildlife in and around the area and the types of real estate that this town has to offer to those interested in investing in game farms or lodges or just owning a house in one of the wildlife estates.  This website is highly informative if you are not familiar with Hoedspruit and it also caters not only for South African buyers but also for overseas investors.  This (above) is what their website previously looked like and after a few drawing board sessions, this is what the new website looks like now (below):  To view this new website and find all kind of b...

Just over 3 years ago, Entegral was the 1st real estate technology service provider in Africa to move all of its products over to the cloud. It all began 4 years ago, when we researched and tested various cloud platforms available. We made a decision on Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) and switched over all our products in the course of 6-12 months to take full benefit of the unique cloud features offered. Our property portal, MyProperty , was our first product to switch over in January 2011. Stressful it was, at that stage cloud platforms were still in its infancy and we took a calculated risk with our business. Either that, or being boxed in by local service providers who couldn’t offer the amazing cloud features we wanted. Our monthly bandwidth costs also increased at alarming rates due to huge traffic. In the end, partnering with Amazon paid off, as can be seen in this 2013 magic quadrant from Gartner comparing the top cloud IaaS providers: It didn’t go all smoothly, we had...

In an industry first, Entegral today announced that all its real estate clients will enjoy unlimited bandwidth on their hosted websites. This includes all Entegral website packages; namely National Websites, SEO profile, template and custom websites. Entegral founder, Adriaan Grove, says that the cost savings are significant for national groups who normally generate excessive traffic every month. For most large South African national real estate groups, the cost of bandwidth can total up to significant amounts and can easily total to 50% or more of their IT bill. Entegral already provided a bandwidth cost which was around 40-90% cheaper than competitor offerings. With the launch of our cloud computing infrastructure (another industry first) this year, we have managed to bring the bandwidth costs down to insignificant amounts and today announced that all clients will enjoy unlimited bandwidth for websites hosted through us. Cost savings through the Cloud The costs savings ar...

Property portals assist real estate organisations in marketing their property listings on more websites and therefore get more exposure and leads. This is an interesting story from Edina Realty , a USA based agency who is going the solo route and pulling their property listings from 3rd party portals like Trulia.  According to Edina Realty: “…Third party aggregators are not brokers. They get listings for free from brokers around the country and then display them online, collecting and distributing leads for profit.  We believe it makes the best business sense for our agents and Edina Realty to control our own listings in order to ensure that: • Our agents don’t lose future business opportunities because a non-listing competitor pays to present themselves as the contact for your listing. • Our agents don’t have to pay – directly or indirectly – for leads on their own listings. • Our sellers can be assured that leads on their listing are being handled by an expert ...

Since the 2005 and the beginning of Entegral Technologies we still have some very loyal and valued clients making use of our systems today.  It was time for a new face for our clients and we re-build and optimized some of the websites to help our clients stay ahead of what the online world has to offer for our clients.  Our famous templates did the job for most of them.  The Property Circle chose a custom design instead.   Here are some of our old-new faces which we are very proud of – set up within 1 working day, fully functional and boasting with features like Google maps and Streetview:   The Property Circle, owned by Gert Meyer from Hibiscus Coast , www.thepropertycircle.co.za           Maximise, owned by Andre Augustyn, www.maximise.co.za   Property Voyage, located in Pretoria , www.propertyvoyage.co.za Suzel Estates whom operates and sells property in Gauteng , North West , Estern Cape and Mpumalanga Ron...

We are proud to announce that we have moved all real estate products and websites (including the OMS) to our new Cloud Hosting infrastructure at Amazon AWS.   Entegral takes the lead by being the first real estate service provider in Southern Africa to make this bold move. Our new cloud infrastructure will allow us to scale our products and services to new levels and provide an unparalleled service uptime . Although we have an excellent track record with service uptime, the outages caused by last week’s hardware failures on our dedicated servers, prompted us to make the move earlier than the planned switchover in June.  With over 100 new SEO profile websites launched in November 2010 we were also quickly outgrowing our dedicated server environment. What is ‘the cloud’? Cloud computing provides Entegral with the power of a shared pool of configurable computing resources (i.e. servers, networks, storage, etc) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal manage...

Send us your photos to solutions@entegral.net and we’ll feature it on our Facebook Real Estate Car Branding/Wrap photo album .  We’ll upload car branding for Southern Africa including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique. I like what Woodberry Estates have done – a very professional clean design. Sometimes you see a ‘cluttered’ car design where the agent has tried to fit in every possible piece of information.  Thing is, people won’t remember everything, so the most import part is the name and either your website address or telephone number. It is all about branding and being visible in your community. People can always ‘google’ your name or relate to it when they see your logo on the web or print. You can view the facebook album here .  We’ve just uploaded it so check on a regular basis for new photos. Who do you think have the most prominent vehicle branding?

One of our clients top agents has a remarkable record of signing deals again and again with the same families in the space of about 10 years. He’s build a reputation of service excellence, and with that, a very loyal client base that makes him one of the best agents in his area and South Africa. Having the most loyal client base is what every estate agent dreams about: Signing a deal and having that client come back to you 5 or 10 years down the line to do another property deal. Having those same clients refer you to their friends and family. The cornerstone of this is based on offering superior customer service on a consistent basis. This book from Paul Dorrian explains 101 lessons towards service supremacy which you may find helpful in your estate agency: Dancing with the Customer : “…We are at a defining moment in thinking about competitiveness. Customer service is no longer an extension of business. It is the core of it. Nor is re...

We have launched a new website for one of Entegral’s oldest RE/MAX franchise clients, RE/MAX Living ’s @ www.remaxliving.co.za 2 new features we’ve introduced which is also available to all our clients on requests are: 1. Multi-suburb search (allows more than one suburb to be selected for a search) 2. Google Map (showing area or if you’ve marked it on the OMS, the exact location of the property):

More and more people are using the internet on daily basis. In effect, more people will also visit your site if your SEO and other online marketing initiatives are any good. For national real estate franchise groups this present a unique challenge. Not only do they need to centralise listings into a single database and make these properties searchable for the general public, but the website needs 99.9% uptime and the speed of searches need to be lightning fast. In general these franchise sites also attracts more visitors than your single agency websites and therefore needs regular tweaking to enhance the response times to visitors. This leaves the master franchise with a difficult question: which database platform is right for my franchise operation? Luckily the answer is a simple one…. Microsoft SQL Server. Entegral has, since 2009, started international rollouts of its OMS system , including custom configurations for large USA based franchise clients.  This presented the Entegr...

Teams from long-term Entegral clients RE/MAX Masters and RE/MAX Living have ‘cleaned up’ at the recent RE/MAX international awards walking away with 3 of the top 5 international awards. Read the full article here . www.remax-masters.co.za – Johannesburg Northern Suburbs including Sandton and Randburg RE/MAX Masters Lance Heroldt of RE/MAX Masters clinched first place and Glenn Joselowitz third place overall. www.remaxliving.co.za – Cape Town and surrounds RE/MAX Living Gerlinde Moser of RE / MAXLiving was ranked third.